f foreign lands, with his recollections of our
great poet:--

As when a scout
Through dark and desert ways with peril gone
All night, at last by break of cheerful dawn,
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some foreign land
First seen, or some renown'd metropolis,
With glitt'ring spires and pinnacles adorn'd,
Which now the rising sun gilds with his beams.

_Paradise Lost_, iii. 543.

The _Sunday Library_, it should be added, is printed in correspondent
style with the _Cabinet Cyclopaedia_, and each volume has a finely
engraved Frontispiece Portrait.

* * * * *

VENETIAN HISTORY.

The _Family Library_ Editor has judiciously enough filled his 20th
volume with "Sketches" from the History of Venice. Another volume is
promised, the present extending from the settlement of the Veneti in
Italy to the year 1406. The intention is stated to be, "to present in
detail some of the most striking incidents of the History of this great
Republic, connecting them with each other by a brief and rapid survey of
minor events;" for which purpose the Editor has freely taxed Sismondi
and the late Count Daru. The result is one of the most enchanting
volumes of historiettes that has ever fallen into our hands;
illustrating, to be sure, numberless dark points, or "damned spots" of
human history; "much of atrocious guilt, of oppression, cruelty, fraud,
treachery, baseness, and ingratitude;" yet the very heinousness of these
characteristics carries on and keeps up the intense interest of the
volume.

We select for extract the "tragical tragedy" of Marino Faliero--not so
much for its novelty to the reader, as for correcting an erroneous view
into which the license of poetry may have led him:--

The name of Marino Faliero is familiar to English ears; but the reader
who borrows his conception of the Doge of Venice from the modern drama
in our language which purports to relate his story, will wander as far
from historic truth as from nature and probability. The _Chronicle_
of Sanuto, which the poet has avowed to be his basis, presents no trace
of that false, overwrought, and unintelligible passion which, in the
tragedy, is palmed upon us for nice sensitiveness to injured honour. We
are told, indeed, that the angry old man had once so far indulged his
choleric humour as to fell to the ground a somewhat tardy